Gaza Peace Delegate: Cayman Kai -- Detained and Denied Entry by Egypt

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March 15 -- Rally for 15Now -- Judkins Park, Seattle, 1PM

Tweet http://www.15now.org/event/march-for-15/

March 15 @ 1:00 pm - 4:00 pm

All across the country people are not only talking about the need to raise the minimum wage they’re taking action. We’re hearing about proposals to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 by 2016. That’s good but not good enough. 

We need a $15/hour minimum wage and we need it now! 

Join 15 Now, fast food and other low-wage workers, Occupy and union activists in a national day of action. 

Let’s March for $15 on March 15th and build the movement to end low pay! 

If there isn’t an action in your area start organizing one today!

Chronology of the Ukrainian Coup -- by Renee Parsons

Tweet http://www.popularresistance.org/chronology-of-the-ukrainian-coup/

Note: A full chronology of US involvement would go back to the build-up to the 2004 Orange Revolution and the massive $5 billion funding the US has admitted to providing the Ukraine opposition since then.

Listening to the US media, even the most diligent news junkie would find it difficult to know that the U.S. State Department played not only a vital role in the violence and chaosunderway in Ukraine but was also complicit in creating the coup that ousted democratically elected President Viktor Yanuyovch.    Given the Russian Parliament’s approval of Putin’s request for military troops to be moved into Crimea, Americans uninformed about the historyof that region might also be persuaded that Russia is the aggressor and the sole perpetrator of the violence.

Let’s be clear about what is at stake here:  NATO missiles on the adjacent Ukraine border aimed directly at Russia would make that country extremely vulnerable to Western goals and destabilization efforts while threatening Russia’s only water access to its naval fleet in Crimean peninsula, the Balkans, the Mediterranean Sea and the Middle East – and not the least of which would allow world economic dominance by the US, the European Union, the IMF, World Bank and international financiers all of whom had already brought staggering suffering to millions around the globe.

The fact is that democracy was not a demand on the streets of Kiev.  The current record of events indicates that protests of civil dissatisfaction were organized by reactionary neo-Nazi forces intent on fomenting a major domestic crisis ousting Ukraine’s legitimate government.   As events continue to spiral out of control, here is the chronology of  how the coup was  engineered to install a government more favorable to EU and US goals 

April 11, 2011 - A Kiev Post article entitled “Ukraine Hopes to Get $1.5 Billion from IMF in June” states that the loan is dependent on pension cuts while   “maintaining cooperation with the IMF, since it influences the country’s interaction with other international financial institutions and private investors” and further that the “attraction of $850 million from the World Bank in 2011, depended on cooperation with the IMF.”   Well, that about says it all – if Ukraine played ball. then the loan money would pour in.

November 21, 2013 -  fast forward to the EU summit in Lithuania when President Yanuyovch  embarrassed the European Union by rejecting its Agreement in favor of joining Russia’s Common Union with other Commonwealth Independent States.

November 27, 2013 – it was not until February 23, 2014 when  Anonymous Ukraine hackersreleased a series of emails from a Lithuanian government advisor to opposition leader and former boxer Vitaly Klitschko regarding plans to destabilize Ukraine; for example:

“Our American friends promise to pay a visit in the coming days, we may even see Nuland or someone from the Congress.”  12/7/2013

“Your colleague has arrived ….his services may be required even after the country is destabilized.” 12/14/2013

“I think we’ve paved the way for more radical escalation of the situation.  Isn’t it time to proceed with more decisive action?” 1/9/2014

November 29, 2013 -  well-orchestrated protestors were already in the streets of Kiev as European Commission President Jose Manual Barroso announced that the EU would “not accept Russia’s veto” of the Agreement.

December 13, 2013 - As if intent on providing incontrovertible evidence of US involvement in Ukraine, Assistant US Secretary of State for Europe and Eurasia Victoria Nuland proudly told a  meeting of the International Business Conference sponsored by the US-Ukrainian Foundation that the US had ‘invested’ more than $5 billion and ‘five years worth of work and preparation” in achieving what she called Ukraine’s ‘European aspirations.” Having just returned from her third trip to Ukraine in five weeks, Nuland boasted of her ‘coordinated high level diplomacy’ and a more than two hour ‘tough conversation’ with Yanukovych.  Already familiar with Nuland as former Secretary Clinton’s spokesperson at State, one can imagine her discourteous tone and manner when she says she made it “absolutely clear” to Yanukovych that the US required “immediate steps” …to “get back into conversation with Europe and the IMF.”   While Western media have portrayed Yanukovych as a ‘weak’ leader, Nuland’s description of a ‘tough’ meeting can only mean that he resisted her threats and intimidations.  In what must have been a touching moment, Nuland spoke about a show of force by government police on demonstrators who “sang hymns and prayed for peace.” 

What Nuland did not reveal on December 13 was that her meetings with ‘key Ukrainian stakeholders’ included neo-Nazi Svoboda party leader Oleh Tyahnybok and  prime minister wannabe Arsenly Yatsenyuk of the Fatherland Party.   At about the same time Nuland waswooing fascist extremists, Sen. John McCain (R-Az) and Sen. Chris Murphy (D- Conn)shared the stage in Kiev with Tyahnybok offering their support and opposition to the sitting government.   The Svoboda party which has roots with extreme vigilante and anti-semitic groups has since received at least three high level cabinet posts in the interim government including deputy prime minister.   There is no doubt that the progenies of west Ukraine’s historic neo-fascist thugs that fought with Hitler are now aligned with the US as represented by Victoria Nuland.

January 24, 2014 – President Yanukoyvch identified foreign elements participating in Kiev protests warning that armed radicals were a danger to peaceful citizens.  Independent newsagencies also reported that “not all of Kiev’s population backs opposition rule, which depends mainly on a group from the former Polish town of Lvov, which holds sway over Kiev downtown – but not the rest of the city.”

January 30, 2014 -   The State Department’s website Media Note announced Nuland’s upcoming travel plans that ”In Kyiv, Assistant Secretary Nuland will meet with government officials, opposition leaders, civil society and business leaders to encourage agreement on a new government and plan of action.”  In other words, almost a month before President Yanukovych was ousted, the US was planning to rid the world of another independently elected President.

February 4, 2014 -  More evidence of Ms. Nuland’s meddling with extremist factions and the high level stakes of war and peace occurred in her taped conversation with U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt discussing their calculations of who’s in and who’s out to replace Yanukovych.   Note mention of Nazi leader Oleh Tyahnybok.   Here are some selected excerpts:

Nuland:   “What do you think?”

Pyatt:   “I think we’re in play… the [Vitali] Klitsch piece is obviously the complicated electron here especially the announcement of him as deputy prime minister. Your argument to him which you’ll need to make,  I think the next phone call  we want to set up is exactly the one you made to Yats [Yatsenyuk].  And I’m glad you sort of put him on the spot on where he fits in this scenario and I’m very glad he said what he said in response.”

Nuland:   “I don’t think Klitsch should go into government. I don’t think its necessary. I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

Pyatt:    “yeah…I mean I guess.  You think…what…in terms of him not going into the government,  just let him sort of stay out and do his political homework and stuff.   I’m just thinking in terms of  the process moving ahead, we want to keep the moderate democrats together.  The problem is going to be Tyahnybok and his guys.  I’m sure that’s what Yanukoyvch  is calculating on all this.”

Nuland:   “I think Yats is the guy who’s got the economic experience, the governing experience.  What he needs is Klitsch and Tyahnybok on the outside and he needs to be talking to them four times a week you know…I think with Klitsch going in at that level working for Yats, it’s not going to work.”

Nuland:   “My understanding is that the big three [Yatsenyuk, Klitsch and Tyahnybok] were going in to their own meeting and that Yats was going to offer in that context a three plus one conversation with you.”

Pyatt:  “ That’s what he proposed but knowing the dynamic that’s been with them where  Klitsch has been top dog;  he’s going to take a while to show up at a meeting, he’s probably talking to his guys at this point so I think you reaching out to him will help with the personality management among the three and gives us a chance to move fast on all this stuff and put us behind it before they all sit down and he explains why he doesn’t like it.”

Nuland:  … “when I talked to Jeff Feltman this morning, he had a new name for the UN  guy …Robert Serry  – he’s now gotten both Serry and Ban ki Moonto agree that Serry could come in Monday or Tuesday… so that would be great I think  to help glue this thing and have the UN help glue it and you know fuck the EU.”

Pyatt:   “Exactly.   I think we’ve got to do something to make it stick together because you can be pretty sure the Russians will be working behind the scenes.    ….Let me work on Klitchko and I think we want to get somebody with an international personality to come out here and help midwife this thing.”

Nuland:  ”…Sullivan’s come back to me saying you need Biden and I said probably tomorrow for an ‘atta boy’ and get the deeds to stick  so Biden’s willing.”

February 20, 2014 –   Foreign ministers from Poland, Germany and France visiting Kiev secured President Yanukovych’s  agreement that would commit the government to an interim administration, constitutional reform and new parliamentary and presidential elections.  With “no clear sign that EU or US pressure has achieved” the desired effect,opposition leaders rejected Yanukovych’s compromise which would have ended the three month stand-off.  Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov called on the German, French and Polish foreign ministers to step in and take responsibility for upholding the deal they helped forge and not let “armed extremists” directly threaten Ukrainian sovereignty.

February 21, 2014  -  At a special summit in Brussels, European foreign ministers agreed to adopt sanctions on Ukraine including visa bans and asset freezes. The EU decision followed “immense pressure from the US for the European powers to take punitive action against the Ukrainian regime.”  Washington had already imposed travel bans on 20 leading Ukrainians.

February 22, 2014 –  An hour after refusing to resign, the Ukrainian Parliament voted, according to Russian president Vladimir Putin, in an unconstitutional action to oust President Yanukovych and that pro-EU forces staged a ‘coup’.  Yanukovych departed Kiev in fear for his life.

March 1, 2014 - During a  conversation initiated by the vice president, Biden delivered his ‘atta boy’ with a phone call to newly installed prime minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk  reaffirming US support for Ukraine’s ‘territorial integrity.”

All of the above machinations expose an incoherent and corrupt American foreign policy with a litany of US hypocrisy that might be hilarious if not for potentially grave global implications. The comment “you just don’t behave by invading another country on completely trumped up pretext” might just win Secretary of State John Kerry the Hypocrisy of the Year Award.   Kerry, of course, famously supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq seeking weapons of mass destruction.

But then again, the President’s own comments that “..countries have deep concerns and suspicions about this kind of meddling..” and that “…as long as none of us are inside Ukraine trying to meddle and intervene.. with decisions that properly belong to Ukrainian people…” while  announcing  $1 billion aid  package to Ukraine (but not Detroit) would be a close runner-up for the Award.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

FUKUSHIMA THREE YEARS ON By Janette D. Sherman, M.D. & Joseph Mangano on Counterpunch

Tweet http://alethonews.wordpress.com/2014/03/04/fukushima-three-years-on/

The third anniversary of the Fukushima meltdown will occur on March 11th.

The news is that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and major Japanese corporations want to re-open the 50 other nuclear power plants that closed when Fukushima blew up, calling them a friendly economic source of cheap power.  Will this end up with business as usual?

We were recently asked if we thought that Fukushima could ever be cleaned up. We have to say “no,” based upon what we know of the biology, chemistry and physics of nuclear power and isotopes and the history of nuclear development.

Chernobyl melted down in 1986 and is still releasing radioisotopes. Not all life systems were examined around Chernobyl, but of those that were – wild and domestic animals, birds, insects, plants, fungi, fish, trees, and humans, all were damaged, many permanently, thus what happens to animals and plants with short-term life spans is predictive of those with longer ones.  Worldwide, some 985,000 “excess” deaths resulted from the Chernobyl fallout in the first 19 years after the meltdown. In Belarus, north of Chernobyl, which received concentrated fallout; only 20% of children are deemed to be “healthy” although previously 80% were considered well. How can a country function without healthy and productive citizens?

Notable in the U. S. is the Hanford Nuclear Site in Washington State, built some 70+ years ago by 60,000 laborers, and currently leaching radioisotopes into the Columbia River. DuPont was the original contractor, but since, multiple corporations, each paid mllions of dollars and have yet to contain the leaking radioactivity.  Every nuclear site is also a major industrial operation, contaminated not only with radioactive materials, but multiple toxic chemicals, such as solvents and heavy metals.

In 1941, the folk singer, Woody Guthrie was hired by the US government’s Department of the Interior to promote the benefits of building the Grand Coulee and Bonneville dams to harness the power of the Columbia River, and to generate electricity and supplement irrigation. It is unlikely that Guthrie learned that the dams were to provide electricity to the Hanford nuclear site, then under construction to produce plutonium for bombs.

He sang:

“Roll on, Columbia roll on

Roll on, Columbia roll on

Your power is turning our darkness to dawn

So roll on Columbia, roll on.”

Rather than turning darkness to dawn, we released nuclear weapons that made the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki “Brighter Than a Thousand Suns” – the title of Robert Jungk’s prophetic book.

Guthrie’s monthly salary was $266 – compare that to the yearly $2 billion it is costing taxpayers now.

From 1946 until 1958, the U. S. tested 67 nuclear weapons in the Marshall Islands, the most famous of which is Bikini Island. Stillbirths, miscarriages and thyroid gland defects were detected early in the islanders. 60 years on, decontamination of Rongelap, a small island, that lies about 180 km east of Bikini Atoll, continues.  Only about 0.15 square kilometer of land has been decontaminated, or just 2 percent of the island’s area, at a cost of $40 million so far. In 1956, the Atomic Energy Commission regarded the Marshall Islands as “by far the most contaminated place in the world”.

Within the U. S., the Nevada Test Site, and countless other sites remain contaminated.  The most recently reported releases occurred in Feb. 2014 at the Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, NM.  Detected in the air were of plutonium-239/240 and americium-241, transuranic elements strongly linked to cancer. So far, thirteen federal contract workers have measured levels of internal radioisotope contamination. The release spread contaminants through more than 3,000 feet of tunnels, up a 2150-foot tall exhaust shaft, out into the environment, and to an air monitoring station approximately 3,000 feet northwest of the exhaust shaft.

Fukushima is still leaking large quantities of Cs-137 and Sr-90 into the Pacific Ocean, where all forms of marine life will absorb them - from algae to seaweed, to fish, to sea mammals and ultimately to humans who consume the contaminated sea life.

Our recently released peer-reviewed paper confirms hypothyroidism in newborns in California, whose mothers were pregnant during the early releases from Fukushima.  Thyroid abnormalities were detected early in Marshall Islanders and in Belarus residents of Gomel located near Chernobyl.  Radioactive iodine, known to interfere with thyroid function entered the U. S. from Fukushima in late March, shortly after the meltdowns, and was carried by dairy products resulting in damage to the unborn.

It takes ten half-lives for an isotope to decay. Sr-90 and Cs-137 have half-lives of approximately 30 years, which means three centuries will occur before the initial releases are gone, and the releases have not stopped.

There are some 26 nuclear reactors in the United States with the same design as those at Fukushima, and they pose a significant risk to people and the environment.  The Indian Point Nuclear Power Reactors are located some 35 miles from mid-town Manhattan, with 18 million people living within 50 miles of the site.  What would be the environmental, human and economic costs if the Indian Point reactors were to fail?

The current estimated price tag to “clean up” the TEPCO mess at Fukushima is $500 billion (that’s billion, with a “B.” For us who have trouble thinking of such numbers, it will take 96,451 years to spend $10.00 per minute.

Unless we close the existing nuclear power plants and build no new ones, we are destined to repeat the on-going stories of Fukushima, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, and the myriad other sites that have already caused untold environmental, health, social, and economic costs. So will it be sanity or business as usual?

Perhaps it was Albert Einstein who defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.  We must choose a sane path away from nuclear energy. Business as usual is Insane.

Janette D. Sherman, M. D. is the author of Life’s Delicate Balance: Causes and Prevention of Breast Cancer and Chemical Exposure and Disease, and is a specialist in internal medicine and toxicology. She edited the book Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and Nature, written by A. V. Yablokov, V. B., Nesterenko and A. V. Nesterenko, published by the New York Academy of Sciences in 2009.  Her primary interest is the prevention of illness through public education.  She can be reached at:  toxdoc.js@verizon.netand www.janettesherman.com

Joseph Mangano, MPH MBA, is the author of Mad Science (pub. 2012) as well and many articles on the effects of nuclear power. He is an epidemiologist, and Executive Director of the Radiation and Public Health Project and can be reached at:  (www.radiation.org).

Footnotes

Jungk, Robert, Brighter than a Thousand Suns, Harcourt, Brace, New York. 369 pp., C. 1956.  (worth getting second-hand.)

Mangano, J, Sherman, J., Busby, C.  Changes in confirmed plus borderline cases of congenital hypothyroidism in California as a function of environmental fallout from the Fukushima nuclear meltdown. Open J. of Pediatrics.  2013, 3:370-376http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/ojped.2013.34067        (http://www.scirp.org/journal/ojped/)

Mangano, J. J., Sherman, J. D.  Elevated airborne beta levels in Pacific/ West Coast U. S. States and trends of hypothyroidism among newborns after the Fukushima nuclear meltdown.  Open J. of Pediatrics, 3:1-9,  March 2013

http://wwwscript.org/journal/ojped/

Yablokov, Alexey V., Nesterenko, Vassily B., Nesterenko, Alexey V., Sherman-Nevinger, Janette D., Consulting Editor.  Chernobyl – Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and Nature.  Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.  Vol 1171, 2009.  Available at:  orders@grekoprinting.com

Israeli Apartheid Week at University of Washington 2014

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UPDATE:  "Contractor for Israel’s apartheid wall wins US border contract"

https://tinyurl.com/k7khr9o

Students United for Palestinian Equal Rights-UW [SUPER] & MECHA UW tie the issue of border walls together during Israeli Apartheid Week 2014.  This is me visiting the wall they built.  Should have got a pic of the other side which was a riot of colors.

There were lots of info signs like the one above.

There were lots of people reading them.

"What the Hell Is Obama Thinking?" -- Daniel Patrick Welch on Ukraine

Tweet http://danielpwelch.com/1403wmfj.htm
via AlethoNews

EXCERPT:

How oblivious or arrogant do you have to be to spend $5 billion dollars destabilizing a country (the actual total is undoubtedly much higher), have your diplomats caught on tape planning a coup, bring a gang of fascist thugs to power on Russia's doorstep--whose first order of business is to outlaw the Russian language, conduct a purge of opposing parties, threaten the Russian-speaking population, threaten to restore Ukraine's nuclear status and provoke and threaten Russia non-stop... and have the *balls* to lecture anyone about interfering? Oh, add to the pot that you have done the same exact thing in several other countries in the past few years alone. It simply boggles the mind.

Continue poking Putin by suggesting he is being a "bully" when he moves to protect the Russian naval base, protect Russians, and listen to the wishes of the elected government of the region who ask for his support, as as new protests erupted across eastern Ukraine rejecting the putschists in Kiev, with  Russian flags being raised over government buildings and protesters brandished signs saying "In Russia We Have Brothers. In Europe We Are Slaves" and "Where We Are, It is Also Russia." This is called an 'invasion' by the people who bought and organized a fascist coup. Bizarro World.

But why do I focus on Obama? After all, he is little more than an irrelevant placeholder president, a sort of ventriloquist's dummy for the vested interests and forces that put him where he is. Furthermore, I am not a fan of any Great Man theory of history that implies superhuman powers to people instead of historical forces. Accordingly, I don't really go in for ad hominem attacks, which seems to be the only stock-in-trade of the western media, whose searing, eternal question seems to be who is the next Hitler. 

Reminder: Vigil this Saturday to END the ISRAELI & EGYPTIAN SIEGE on GAZA! March 1, noon-2pm@ Westlake

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Join Voices for Palestine this Saturday to demand an END to the ISRAELI & EGYPTIAN SIEGE on Gaza!

Where: Westlake, 4th & Pine

When: Saturday March 1, Noon-2pm

 

 

To learn more about the suffering in Gaza under Siege, please click on the link below;

 

Gaza children with terminal illness spend their final years under the siege

 

http://palsolidarity.org/2014/02/gaza-children-with-terminal-illness-spend-their-final-years-under-the-siege/

 

 

##### 

Amin Odeh

VoicesofPalestine.org

"Stand up for what is right,even if you are standing alone"

MUST SEE!!! AIPAC Policy Conference 2014 - Boycott AIPAC

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Boycott McPoverty speakers 2-20-14

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